Brian Parsons

It seems no matter how careful and disciplined you are with your git workflow, you end up in a situation where you have incomplete work that you need to …uh.. “stash” somewhere because it isn’t ready to be committed. Luckily, git has a feature to handle just that. The blog link below is a great overview of the stash feature in git.

Link: Git: How to use Stash

Great slides with awesome tips from a talk given at Sunshine PHP. Implementation case studies, when to use redis and not as well as a comparison between phpredis and predis.

Link: Redis Everywhere

Arch Linux EC2 AMIs have been updated. This release includes a patch for CVE-2014-0038. If you are using these images you should upgrade to the latest kernel (LTS or mainstream).

Really great points and techniques that anyone running a web service with a sign-up process should look at and learn from.

Link: Onboarding New Users Is Harder Than You Think

All these stats talk about possible peaks. The valleys are what you need to look at when it comes to cloud performance. It is not about how fast it can go as much as how slow it might be. 1000 IOPS is great but if it occasionally drops to 15 that’s a problem. Amazon is slower but more consistent, and that is something that you can plan around. I look forward to benchmarking these Rackspace offerings on my own to see how they compare.

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Looks neat. PHP esque + python string manipulation model is very tempting. My personal blog uses Mako which is embedded-python templates.

Link: The Slash Programming Language

Nice sleuthing and humorously written alert / background info on SSL connections in Android. SSL is one of the least problematic security / privacy issues with a smartphone, but I found it entertaining as I have gone through a round of hardening servers and apps and in the process have learned much about ciphers and handshake protocols.

Link: Why Android SSL was downgraded from AES256-SHA to RC4-MD5 in late 2010

Very interesting approach to increasing the quality and speed of your coding as well as learning new languages.

Link: Using Katas To Improve

I have had the pleasure of working with AlchemyAPI and it is for real. I found it to be excellent at entity and sentiment extraction. For many applications if you are looking for certain things (like brands) - you can have it leverage your own dictionary as one of the sources. Truly brilliant and for real. It’s great to see those guys getting some due finally.

Link: AlchemyAPI says it’s delivering Google-level deep learning as a service

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Great info on how to optimize mobile apps to be easy on data and battery.

Link: If You’re Programming a Cell Phone Like a Server You’re Doing it Wrong